Your Marketing Follows Every Best Practice. That's Why Nobody Remembers It.

In 1963, Fred Manley, VP and Creative Director at BBDO, wrote a satirical takedown of what he called "the most inept, most ineffectual, most misguided" ad in recent history: Volkswagen's "Think Small."

His complaint? The ad broke every rule. The product was tiny in the frame. The headline was negative. There was no logo, no people enjoying the product, no news, no dealer information. So Manley "fixed" it. He made the car bigger. Changed the headline to "Think BIG!" Added a mansion, dancers, and a pair of thoroughbreds. Slapped on a huge logo. Localised it with a dealer's address.

The result was a perfectly rule-following, utterly forgettable car ad.

The original "Think Small," art-directed by Helmut Krone and written by Julian Koenig at DDB, went on to become Advertising Age's #1 advertising campaign of the 20th century. VW's annual U.S. sales climbed from 120,000 units in 1959 to over 423,000 by 1968. A 250% increase, driven by an ad that violated every best practice in the book.

Manley's satire was a joke. But the lesson is deadly serious. And 63 years later, most Australian businesses are making the exact mistake he was mocking.

Logic gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, puts it bluntly in his book Alchemy: "It doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical."

His reasoning is simple. When every business follows the same playbook, every business arrives at the same destination. The same Google Ads copy. The same landing page layout. The same stock photo of a handshake. The same "trusted by 500+ businesses" claim that nobody believes because everyone makes it.

Sutherland calls this the fatal issue: "Logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors." The most dangerous marketing isn't bad marketing. It's competent, rule-following, thoroughly researched marketing that produces results identical to everything around it.

This isn't theoretical. Walk through any Australian industry vertical and compare the top five Google Ads results. The headlines blur together. The landing pages follow the same template. The value propositions are interchangeable. A plumber's ad looks like every other plumber's ad. A financial adviser's website reads like every other financial adviser's website.

They're all following best practices. And they're all invisible.

The scale of the sameness problem

The numbers are staggering. In 2026, global ad spend exceeds $1 trillion. But effectiveness is moving in the opposite direction.

The IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) data, drawn from decades of effectiveness case studies analysed by Peter Field, paints an even starker picture:

The root cause isn't lazy marketing. It's the opposite. It's diligent, well-researched, best-practice-following marketing that arrives at the same output as everyone else. As one industry analysis described it: "Scroll any social feed today, and you'll see endless clones of the same UGC testimonial, the same 'day in the life' product demo, the same hook, the same voiceover, the same aesthetic." AI tools have accelerated this convergence, making it faster and cheaper to produce more of the same.

The irony: businesses have never had more data, more tools, more best practice guides, and more AI-powered optimisation. Their marketing has never been less effective.

Best practices are the floor, not the ceiling

Here's the uncomfortable maths.

A best practice is, by definition, something widely adopted. If most businesses in your industry follow the same landing page structure, the same ad copy formula, the same email sequence, then following those practices makes you average. Not bad. Average. And in a market where buyers make snap decisions based on what stands out, average is functionally the same as invisible.

Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have spent decades studying how brands actually grow. Their central finding: brands don't grow because people think they're the best option. Brands grow because people notice them and remember them. That's what they call mental availability: the probability that a buyer will think of your brand when a purchase trigger occurs.

Mental availability isn't built by having a superior product or a more compelling value proposition. It's built by being the most distinctive option. The brand that looks, sounds, and feels different from everything else in the category.

And this is where the best-practice trap becomes a genuine strategic problem. Research by Ipsos and JKR, analysing over 26,000 respondents across brand assets globally, found that only 15% of brand assets are truly distinctive. Logos, slogans, colours, mascots: 85% of them fail to trigger brand recognition reliably.

The reason? Most brands design their identity by looking at what competitors do and doing something similar. They follow best practices. They end up with a blue logo, a sans-serif font, and a stock photo of someone smiling at a laptop.

Think about the brands you actually remember. Bunnings' green and red. The AAMI jingle. Menulog's delivery ads. None of these are "differentiated" in any meaningful product sense. They're distinctive. You know them when you see them, even before you process the message. That recognition is worth more than any clever headline.

The creativity multiplier most businesses ignore

If the sameness problem explains why most marketing fails, the creativity dividend explains what happens when you get it right.

The three factors:

Les Binet and Peter Field's parallel research across 996 IPA campaigns confirms the pattern: creative quality multiplies ROI by 10-20x, and emotional campaigns drive profit at roughly twice the rate of rational ones over the long term.

This is the opposite of what most SMEs do. Most small businesses create a new ad every month, rotate creative constantly, and kill anything that doesn't produce leads in the first fortnight. They're optimising for novelty when the data demands consistency. We've written about why your best ad probably died two weeks ago and the damage of pulling creative too early. The System1/Effie data confirms it: every time you replace a working ad, you reset the mental availability clock to zero.

What This Means for Your Business

None of this means you should ignore best practices entirely. A landing page still needs a clear headline, a visible call to action, and fast load times. Google Ads still need relevant keywords and strong ad rank. Best practices prevent you from making basic mistakes.

But best practices are the floor. They get you from bad to acceptable. They do not get you from acceptable to memorable. That leap requires something the best-practice playbook can't give you: the courage to be distinctive.

Here's what the research points to for an Australian SME:

The businesses that stand out in 2026 won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools. The winners will be the ones with the courage to be distinctive in a market that rewards sameness with silence.

Your competitors are following every best practice. That's your opening.

Further Reading

• The Creative Dividend by System1 and Effie Worldwide: the research behind the 12x profit multiplier for distinctive, emotional advertising
• Only 15% of brand assets are 'truly distinctive', study finds from Marketing Week, covering the Ipsos/JKR research across 26,000 respondents
• Mark Ritson: Data reveals the "three factors" of good creative from MiniMBA, unpacking the emotion x fluency x time formula
• The creative effectiveness crisis from Marketing Week, reporting Peter Field's IPA analysis of declining campaign effectiveness
• Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense by Rory Sutherland, the full argument for why logic is a competitive dead end